Current broadcast and streaming video and media systems offer many features to viewers. Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) allow viewers to record and replay live broadcasts. However, viewers watching a live video stream cannot rewind the video stream past where they tuned into it, and also cannot fast forward the video stream, unless they have paused it, and then they can only catch up to the live video stream.
A similar problem exists for video on demand (VOD) viewers. VOD allows viewers to modify playback (referred to as “trick play”) such as pause, rewind, fast forward., etc.). VOD features tend to have high latency when entering and exiting trick play modes.
Further, conventional near VOD and/or television suffers from limitations when someone wants to “start-over” or rewind a program to see content that was broadcast prior to when they tuned into it. The current near VOD infrastructure can not support more than a few hundred VOD streams. If a separate unicast VOD stream was to be used to solve these problems, the system would not be practical on current systems. For example, if popular content like major sporting events or speeches allowed “start-over” VOD sessions, the system would become overloaded in a short period of time.
Unicast VOD sessions take up a large amount of bandwidth for a single viewer, and they have high latency when entering and exiting trick play modes. Further, it is not possible to fast forward past the current “live” position of linear broadcast feeds.